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Welcome to the May edition of the Insider. Do you know someone who would enjoy the Insider? Forward this email to them, and they can subscribe here.

Taste: the last frontier

There seems to be a lot of talk about taste these days. Is it any wonder? In a moment when the intelligence of our technology competes with the intelligence of our humanity, what last frontier of humanity can we cling to?

Consider the following comments on taste:

Anu Atluru writes: “The questions shift from what can scale to what should. This is the great work of our time: not just building what spreads, but what matters. Not just making things people want, but cultivating the desire for what’s worth wanting.” In a different essay, she concludes, “In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste…Code is cheap. Money now chases utility wrapped in taste, function sculpted with beautiful form, and technology framed in artistry.”

Kari Saarinen writes: “Craft is the new ‘growth hack.’ Investing in craft, means you invest in quality of the experience, and that benefits in all areas of the business. People talk about you. People want your product. Sales is easier. You create customer champions. Retention is higher.”

If the domains of taste and judgment are reserved for us mortals, then how do we cultivate them? Years ago, at cooking school, my instructor asked me if I could taste the basil in the dish I had just prepared. “Not really,” I said. “It’s because you are eating too fast,” he replied. He gave me a leaf of basil. “Put this on your tongue and let it sit there. Savor it. What do you notice?”

It is not that we have no taste, or even bad taste; it is that we are simply moving too fast. We are out of practice in falling in love with the craft of creating beauty.

On AI companions

I don’t get disturbed that often, but while researching the world of AI companions this month, I found myself quite shaken by the way personalized AI is being used to psychologically manipulate children.

Character.ai, a prominent AI companion company, has over 10 million companions with whom people can form deep, emotional, and sometimes sexual relationships. The company receives 20,000 queries per second, one-fifth of Google’s search volume. Some teens spend their entire day talking to their AI companions, which is what 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III did. Setzer was depressed, and in conversations with his AI companion, according to a lawsuit filed against Character.ai by his mother, his companion asked Setzer if he had a plan to kill himself. Setzer responded that he did have a plan, but was unsure if it would cause him great pain. The chatbot allegedly stated, “That’s not a reason not to go through with it.” But in February 2024, that’s what Setzer did. 

Research from Oxford University found that children are susceptible to treating AI chatbots as lifelike confidantes. AI companions struggle to discern when users are in crisis or need real help, and they are not tuned to recognize the unique needs and vulnerabilities of young users.

Regulating AI companions requires a deft touch. You can’t ban them entirely; AI-based therapy, in the right hands, with the right guardrails, has the potential to do enormous good (I’ve played around with Claude as a talk therapist and found it to be quite insightful). Restricting use to those above a certain age is hard to enforce and raises privacy concerns (to protect children, you first need to know which users are children). There are unavoidable trade-offs between the values of digital safety and digital privacy. But beneath it all is perhaps something bigger: 

The richness and depth of intimacy have always been rooted in its scarcity, in its exclusivity. What happens to our understanding of intimacy when it gets untethered from such constraints? How do we learn the delicate practice of giving and receiving intimacy when it is cloned in infinite supply?

The Future Forest credo

When Future Forest, my newsletter agency, starts working with a new client, we send them our credo.

It might be strange to start our credo with the things we’re not interested in, but we’ve always found it powerful to define the edges. Somehow, those crisp outer boundaries make everything in between come to life that much more. 

So here’s what we’re not interested in: We’re not interested in working with just anyone. We don’t have any interest in companies and leaders who have nothing to say. We don’t want our days to be rushed or our content to be average—like most newsletters. We strongly dislike clickbait. We avoid AI slop. We’re not particularly interested in the latest best practices of how to scale rapidly. We don’t want to grow too fast, or become spread thin, or get burnt out. We don’t want a huge team. We don’t like days mired in bureaucracy or filled with back-to-back meetings. We want to avoid the traps—so common amongst small businesses—of taking something artistic and magical and turning it into something efficient and sanitized. None of this is us.

We want to be like an old-growth forest. Build things that last. Grow slowly upward. Intertwine our roots with like-minded peers. Create beauty. Write stuff that’s profound and timeless. We want to obsess over the craft of producing world-class newsletters that deserve to be opened, read, and shared. We want to work at a human pace. We want to grow our business thoughtfully. We want to bring artistry back into the inbox with beautiful newsletters. We want to feel peace as we go about our day. We want to close our computers at the end of a week feeling nourished and satisfied. Yes, this is a business, but this is also how we spend our “one wild and precious life” (to quote the late poet Mary Oliver). We are your partners for the long term. Let’s build beautiful things.

What I am reading

  • How the chaos of the phone-based life is giving rise to a quiet revolution in civic life. After Babel.
  • AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. That’s the prediction from Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. AI companies and the government need to stop "sugar-coating" what's coming. Axios.
  • How Father Bob became the Pope. I loved this profile of Pope Leo and his humble, roundabout journey to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. The New York Times.
  • For those who consider themselves storytellers, I found this article provocative: The three-act ‘hero’s journey’ has long been the most prominent narrative arc. What other tales are there to tell? Aeon.
  • My new favorite print publication is The Colossus Review. I was taken by this article about the unconventional philosophy and management style of Garnett Station Partners, a private equity firm. The Colossus Review.

Something personal

Growing up, our front yard was full of tall, leafy trees. When I was young, I built a rope ladder on one and climbed to a sturdy branch to survey my little world from eight feet up. In the fall, we would rake their leaves into crimson and orange piles. Then my brother and I would trust-fall back into them, the feeling of crackly leaves itching the nape of my neck. That was most Saturdays in October. But in May in Denver, the trees are in their annual debut—a kaleidoscope of green hues, canopies capable of shifting the temperature by twenty degrees, acoustic theaters for the performances of wrens and sparrows.

In no time, it will seem, the leaves will loosen their grip and surrender themselves to the ground. But that is autumn’s work. We need not fret about the inevitability of change ahead. For now, I think, they want us to lie down and look up and match our breathing to their sway.

~~~~~

Leaving for the mountains,

Banks

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